Field Experience Response: Week 7

This week I continued on with my health lessons, with this week’s topic being about self-esteem. What I thought went well in my lesson is that the students were engaged in the activity they were expected to do, which was instead of drawing a self-portrait, they were partnered up and drawing a portrait of their partner. I also thought the discussion before the activity went well, the students all had great answers to my prompts which I was really happy with.

What didn’t go as planned is that I let the students pick their own partners, because there have been no issues with partners in the past. When I was pre-conferencing with my coop teacher, I asked her what her opinion was about pairing the students up and she agreed with me that they would be fine choosing their own. However, two boys decided to rekindle their long lost friendship that day and as a pair, they did not work well together at all. I noticed that they were not on task at all, so I continued to go to their area and ask them how they were doing and they just literally ignored me the entire time. I had to actually physically get in between them to get their attention because they were so engrossed in their conversation with each other. They were not taking the assignment seriously at all, and making fun of each other in their drawings, which was an issue I was worrying about. I told them they needed to get working on their assignments seriously or else they would be split up. They didn’t think I was serious so they continued to goof off and I told them okay, lets go back to your desks. They realized I was serious and one of the students said, “Fine, we will finish the stupid assignment”. I wasn’t happy that they were speaking to me like that or about the assignment. What I eventually ended up doing is asking my partner to sit with them to make sure they were on task and they finally got to work and finished. Also when I was having my closing discussion with the students the classroom was so loud from the other rooms beside us, and with everyone combined the noise levels were so loud so it was hard to get and hold their attention so I was disappointed I wasn’t able to completely finish my lesson as I had hoped too.

Obviously next time I would spend more time thinking about how to pair up the partners, but it really is just something I had to learn through experience because I would have never thought that I would have that much trouble with those particular students, especially together. I know that in my future classroom, I likely won’t have another person there to supervise two students the entire work period so I would have to make sure I had another plan that I planned ahead.

Something I learned this week is that I do tend to get frustrated easily, especially with younger students being so silly. I get annoyed how they act and so I am looking forward to work with older students in the future to see how I react in that setting. I am not naive, I obviously don’t think that older students will have no behaviour issues or that they won’t act silly either, but I just am interested to see how I react in that setting. This week my class definitely put my classroom management skills to the test, but that is the only way I will learn, is through experience!